Judgmental

Jeff Mateer, a high-ranking official in Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office who President Donald Trump has nominated for a federal judgeship, said in speeches in 2015 that transgender children are part of “Satan’s plan” and argued same-sex marriage would open the floodgates for “disgusting” forms of marriage, according to CNN.

“In Colorado, a public school has been sued because a first grader and I forget the sex, she’s a girl who thinks she’s a boy or a boy who thinks she’s a girl, it’s probably that, a boy who thinks she’s a girl,” Mateer said in a May 2015 speech first reported by CNN, referencing a Colorado lawsuit that involved a transgender girl’s parents suing her school for prohibiting her from using the restroom she preferred. “I mean it just really shows you how Satan’s plan is working and the destruction that’s going on.”

In the same speech, Mateer also criticized the 2015 U.S. Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage as taking the nation back to a time of “debauchery.”

“I mean, it’s disgusting,” he said. “I’ve learned words I didn’t know. There are people who marry themselves. Somebody wanted to marry a tree. People marrying their pets. It’s just like — you know, you read the New Testament and you read about all the things and you think, ‘Oh, that’s not going on in our community.’ Oh yes it is. We’re going back to that time where debauchery rules.”

All righty then. Note that this wasn’t pulled out of an old email or a paper he wrote in college, it’s from a speech he made at a public event two years ago. Is there any reason to believe that Jeff Mateer would treat everyone who came before his court in a fair and impartial manner? Surely any LGBT person would have good cause to doubt that, but so would anyone who doesn’t share Mateer’s views on, well, pretty much anything. He’s made a career out of claiming that privileges people of his religious faith. “Travesty” is not a strong enough word for making this guy a visiting judge, much less giving him a lifetime appointment to a federal bench. Unfortunately, he’s far from the only such nominee, in Texas and all around the country. The Chron and the Current have more.